What is the first question our parents asked about us after we were born? Probably, 'Is it a boy or a girl?' No single fact about us is more significant than our sex. In any human culture, it determines how others react to us and how they treat us. "Viva Le Difference", a light-hearted exploration of sex differences, shows how this view violates not only everyday experience and common sense, but the accumulating evidence of science that men and women are profoundly different creatures. Authors Anthony Walsh and Grace J. Walsh begin with a look at the genetic and hormonal bases of sex by viewing maleness and femaleness as a continuum based on the degree of masculisation of the brain. Next, they explore different sexual aspects of the human body other than the reproductive organs. They look at size, strength, and endurance, and many other differences in capacity, as well as sensory (eyes, nose, ears, etc.) differences. From there, the discussion focuses on differences in the brain and mind, health and illness among men and women, and the different ways in which men and women experience emotion, with an emphasis on that most intense emotion of all - love. Informative and entertaining, this book offers a fresh, insightful, and lively look at what makes men and women unique.

Since Vietnam introduced economic reforms in the mid-1980s, domestic service has become an established sector of the labour market, and domestic workers have become indispensable to urban life in the rapidly changing country. This book analyzes the ways in which the practices and discourses of domestic service serve to forge and contest emerging class identities in post-reform Vietnam. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of qualitative data, including ethnographies, interviews, and narratives, it shows that such practices and discourses are rooted in cultural notions of gender and rural-urban difference and enduring socialist structures of feeling, which, in turn, clash with the realities of growing differentiation. Domestic workers' experiences reveal negotiations with class boundaries actively set by the urban middle class, who seek distinction through emerging notions and practices of domesticity. These boundaries are nevertheless riddled with gender and class anxiety on the side of the latter, partly because of the very struggles and contestations of the domestic workers. More broadly, Minh T. N. Nguyen links the often invisible intimate dynamics of class formation in the domestic sphere with wider political economic processes in a post-socialist country embarking on marketization while retaining the political control of a party-state. As a pioneering ethnographic study of domestic service in Vietnam today, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asian culture & society, social anthropology, gender studies, human geography and development studies.

During the past three decades, feminist scholars have successfully demonstrated the ubiq uity and omnirelevance of gender as a sociocultural construction in virtually all human collectivities, past and present. Intrapsychic, interactional, and collective social processes are gendered, as are micro, meso, and macro social structures. Gender shapes, and is shaped, in all arenas of social life, from the most mundane practices of everyday life to those of the most powerful corporate actors. Contemporary understandings of gender emanate from a large community of primarily feminist scholars that spans the gamut of learned disciplines and also includes non-academic activist thinkers. However, while in corporating some cross-disciplinary material, this volume focuses specifically on socio logical theories and research concerning gender, which are discussed across the full array of social processes, structures, and institutions. As editor, I have explicitly tried to shape the contributions to this volume along several lines that reflect my long-standing views about sociology in general, and gender sociology in particular. First, I asked authors to include cross-national and historical material as much as possible. This request reflects my belief that understanding and evaluating the here-and-now and working realistically for a better future can only be accomplished from a comparative perspective. Too often, American sociology has been both tempero- and ethnocentric. Second, I have asked authors to be sensitive to within-gender differences along class, racial/ethnic, sexual preference, and age cohort lines."

During the past decade governments around the globe have introduced institutional mechanisms to promote the advancement of women, including measures to increase women's political participation rates and to incorporate women's interests into policy-making. Why have they done so? How successful have these initiatives been? What are the emerging agendas facing gender equality advocates now? In the New Politics of Gender Equality Judith Squires examines the origins, evolution and key features of three strategies that have been employed across the world in pursuit of gender equality - quotas, policy agencies and gender mainstreaming. The author critically examines each strategy to see how far they transform political institutions and agendas and to what extent they lead rather to the assimilation of women in male-defined structures. Squires argues that a multi-pronged approach, drawing on democratic rather than technocratic strategies, offers the best potential for advancing gender equality. She highlights too the limitations of approaches that ignore inequalities among women and the challenges of developing equality initiatives to address multiple and cross-cutting inequalities between groups. Judith Squires is Professor of Political Theory, University of Bristol. She has written, researched and published widely in the field of gender politics and gender equality.

The YMCA and the YWCA have been an integral part of America's urban landscape since their emergence almost 150 years ago. Yet the significant influence these organizations had on American society has been largely overlooked. Men and Women Adrift explores the role of the YMCA and YWCA in shaping the identities of America's urban population.

Examining the urban experiences of the single young men and women who came to the cities in search of employment and personal freedom, these essays trace the role of the YMCA and the YWCA in urban America from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The contributors detail the YMCA's early competition with churches and other urban institutions, the associations' unique architectural style, their services for members of the working class, African Americans, and immigrants, and their role in defining gender and sexual identities.

The volume includes contributions by Michelle Busby, Jessica Elfenbein, Sarah Heath, Adrienne Lash Jones, Paula Lupkin, Raymond A. Mohl, Elizabeth Norris, Cliff Putney, Nancy Robertson, Thomas Winter, and John D. Wrathall.

This collection looks from a variety of angles at the human body as it resists the determinations of gender, sexuality, socialization, and history. Ranging from classical hermaphrodites, Bruegel's blind faces and Weimar transgender surgery, via Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, state-socialist sport and Proust, to Barbie, Lari Pittman, American Psycho, IVF, and video dance, the 16 essays question the relationship between politics, culture, and desire.

According to a 1992 World Health Organization report, more than 100 million couples throughout the world make love on any given day. Every moment, lovers are locked in passion, compelled by a natural urge driving all peoples in all centuries. And yet this same natural desire has all too often been regarded as a dangerous force and even branded as obscene. Religious taboos have tainted sex with guilt and punishment. Earlier in this century, artists could be imprisoned for portraying sex. Today, despite two decades of easing restrictions on sexual expression and greater freedom for the practice of non-traditional lifestyles, religious fundamentalists and other extremists seek to turn back the clock, advocating prosecution of any whom they regard as sexually subversive or exploitative, and recommending strict censorship of artistic or literary expressions of erotic emotion. The Art of Lovemaking: An Illustrated Tribute is a spirited rebuttal to those crying for renewed censorship. In this sumptuous volume, James Haught brings together the works of many modern and classic artists to show that the depiction of love and desire is not only alive and well but an important theme in art, both in the East and West, throughout the ages. While styles differ and artistic conventions vary, the same message shines through: that love is beautiful and therefore ought to be looked at and enjoyed, not regarded as shameful. The Art of Lovemaking, intended for the private pleasure of adult couples, may be perused solely for its sensual loveliness. But its purpose is also to refute three unhealthy calumnies: the puritanical axiom that sex itself is dirty, the ultrafeminist contention that any portrayal of sexdegrades women, and the vulgar notion that reduces all erotic art to the level of pornography. These fallacious views must retreat before the simple honesty of major artists depicting lovers as affectionate equals. In his superb introduction, Russell Vannoy discusses various philosophical and cultural approaches to sexuality and the problems of trying to formulate a single, hence exclusive, definition of sexual love.

This set brings together a collection of classic out-of-print works that offer some surprising new takes on the theme of sexuality in literature. Whether examining new spaces by unrepresented women writers of colour or looking afresh at gay writings of the early twentieth century, this set presents a thought-provoking take on the subject, and as such is an essential reference source.

This book explores the complexity of women's social status in the Middle East and North African region and fills a gap in the existing literature by providing an up-to-date and comprehensive portrait of women's status from a theoretical and socio-demographic perspective. The author debunks some common assumptions regarding the economic, cultural, and demographic transformations of the MENA region. The book highlights the social forces that have transformed the region over the past several decades. Debunking requires exploring the inter-relationship of multiple factors that influence women's integration into public life, factors such as fertility, education, employment and labor migration. It necessitates examining the impact of sudden oil wealth in the region as well as looking at the complex ways in which patriarchal systems are intertwined and often embedded in religion and then enforced by governments.

Today within neoliberal democracies, gender and sexuality provisions give people the opportunity of being granted social and legal protection. But how does the asylum system intervene within claimants' understandings of themselves and in what ways does this affect their livelihoods in the country of arrival? The Sexual Politics of Asylum emerges from a 2 year long ethnography, which explores the experiences of 60 gender and sexual minority refugees in the UK. Bringing previously unheard stories to the forefront, this enlightening volume challenges dominant notions about the construction of sexuality and gender as an instrument for claiming rights in a world shaped by postcolonial relations. Giametta first examines why the migratory experience of the studied migrants is located within a set of humanitarian-inflected discourses that privilege suffering and trauma. This is then followed by an assessment of the respondents' biographical accounts, which consequently uncovers how being situated in liminal socio-political and legal interstices produces precarious forms of life. Whilst the topic of asylum for gender and sexual minorities has attracted wide media coverage over the past decade, there persists a lack of academic attention to the complex experiences of these refugees. As such, this timely book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in human rights, sociology, anthropology, migration, sexuality, gender and cultural studies, as well as people working within the refugee granting process.

Conjugal Rites explores the legal shape of marriage as it has been determined by countless decisions concerning entry and exit into the ancient rite. Heather Brook examines the countless rules and protocols governing marriage that make it valid in the eyes of the law. She argues that the various sexual performatives associated with marriage can establish, reinforce, or rupture conjugal unity while exploring the historical and politcal regulations and prohibitions marriage has faced. Brook unites past and present, public and private, to investigate the changing meanings and effects of conjugality, and challenge the way we think about sex, gender and relationships.

This book contributes to an understanding of the complex relationship of gender and language alongside religion and religious life as experienced by various religious groups around the world. The intention is to put forward current studies in the field of linguistics and explore how gender and various religions intersect with language use. The universal and diverse experience of religion provides for this unique collection of papers concerning the use of language in religious liturgy, in religious communities, and in interaction with identity. As such, the book will attract students and researchers in discourse, gender studies and religious studies.

The first definitive book on researching gay and lesbian market behavior, Untold Millions: The Truth About Gay and Lesbian Consumers in America will help marketers, advertisers, and public relations managers learn how to successfully market and research products for gay and lesbian consumers. Author Grant Lukenbill, a leading consultant on the cultural and motivational aspects of gay and lesbian consumer behavior, provides you with important procedures, research, and guidelines that businesses today are following in order to develop successful marketing strategies to this growing target audience. From this updated and revised edition, you'll receive current methods, new data, and sure-fire strategies that will help your company break into this market segment, satisfy intended customers, and boost company sales.Providing you with statistics and data from the first market research study of its kind, the Yankelovich MONITOR's Gay and Lesbian Perspective, this book gives you suggestions on what things need to be done within your company before planning your marketing strategies. You'll benefit from ideas and suggestions in Untold Millions that will help you create consumer-driven market strategies to gays and lesbians, including: recognizing that there are families and relationships in society that are not heterosexual acknowledging age differences and the needs of particular generations attracting customers by circulating non-discriminatory hiring policies through press releases and company memos, installing domestic partner health care plans, and identifying cultural reference points to which gays and lesbians can relate remembering that many gays and lesbians may look at business with cynicism and doubt and may be quick to interpret actions as victimization referring to the Wall Street project before addressing gay- and lesbian-specific issues focusing on the areas of individuality, a need for association, and the need to allevia

Debra A. Hope The Nebraska Symposium on Motivation is steeped in history and tradition. Over the years the series editors have striven to maintain the highest standards of a- demic excellence and to highlight some of the most important trends in psychology. Perusing the chapter titles in the first 53 volumes shows the shifting emphasis as the science of psychology developed in the latter half of the twentieth century. All of the most important topics are there - drive theory, social learning, the cognitive revolution, developing perspectives on understanding individual differences and the role of culture, and the increasing role of neuroscience. The key figures are there as well - Harry Harlow, Kenneth Spence, Raymond Cattell, George Kelly, Albert Bandura, Carl Rogers, Carroll Izard, Walter Mischel, Sandra Bem, Sandra Spence, Herbert Simon, David Barlow, and many others. In late 2004, I met with a group of interested graduate students, and together we developed a proposal to join this long and proud tradition with a volume on sexual orientation. Our motivation stemmed, in part, from the events around us. The same-sex m- riage debate was covered extensively in the media, reflecting a rapid and important discussion about sexual orientation that we were having (and are still having) as a society. Psychology and related fields have much to offer on many of the issues raised in this debate.

Henry James remained throughout his life focused on his boyhood and early manhood, and correspondingly on younger boys and men, and John R. Bradley illustrates how it is in the context of such narcissism that James consistently dealt with male desire in his fiction. He also traces a more subtle but related trajectory in James's writing from a Classical to a Modernist gay discourse, which in turn is shown to have been paralleled by a shift in James's fiction from naturalistic beginnings to later stylistic evasion and obscurity. This radical book, which covers the whole of James's career, will quickly be recognized as a defining text in this emerging field of James studies.

Work-life integration is an increasingly hot topic in the media, social research, governments and in people's everyday lives. This volume offers a new type of lens for understanding work-family reconciliation by studying how work-family dynamics are shaped, squeezed and developed between consistent or competing logics in different societies in Europe and the US. The three institutions of "state", "family" and "working life", and their under-explored primary logics of "regulation", "morality" and "economic competitiveness" are examined theoretically as well as empirically throughout the chapters, thus contributing to an understanding of the contemporary challenges within the field of work-family research that combines structure and culture. Particular attention is given to the ways in which the institutions are confronted with various moral norms of good parenthood or motherhood and ideals for family life. Likewise, the logic of policy regulation and gendered family moralities are challenged by the economic logic of working life, based on competition in favour of the most productive workers and organizations. Demonstrating different aspects of what is behind and between the logics of state regulation, morals and market, this innovative volume will appeal to students, teachers and researchers interested in areas such as family studies, welfare state studies, social policy studies, work life studies as well as and gender studies.

In this original work, Stone studies the structure and social presuppositions of several narratives from the Deuteronomistic History in which sexual activity plays a significant role. Both narratological and anthropological tools are utilized in the textual analysis. Stone interestingly notes the link between sexual activity, gender and prestige structures; the emphasis on male contest and female chastity discussed by anthropologists of honour and shame; and the role of the exchange of women in relations between men. In each story, sexual practice is primarily related to male struggles for honour and power.>

This volume is a holistic assessment of six decades of European integration as seen through a gender lens. It features the insights of scholars from nine countries, who analyze new and old barriers to gender equality in all realms of EU activity. The first part of the volume offers a critique of mainstream integration theories and situates women across core institutional settings. It traces women's roles as formal actors, as participants in expert networks, and as creative conceptualizers introducing paradigm-changing frameworks and strategies. It also recognizes women as policy innovators contributing to the larger integration project. In the second part the contributors pay special attention to the development and effects of gender mainstreaming. They explore 'gendering' dynamics and outcomes in EU policy domains, including agriculture, the employment and social policy fields, the research, science and technology sector, and the emergent EU migration and citizenship policy arena.

This is an important collection of essays, many of them very original and outstanding, that will further the field of history of sexuality in general and will contribute to the German historiography in particular. . Lutz Sauerteig, University of Durham

This volume provides a thought provoking and thorough engagement with various aspects of Foucault's writing, at once paying homage to core themes in the history of German sexuality and charting a course for future research...The organization, structure, and coherence of each section is very strong...Most intriguing is its blend of approaches and blurring of time, distance (the Atlantic divide in scholarship, that is), and disciplinarity. . Jennifer Evans, Carleton University

Michel Foucault's seminal "The History of Sexuality" (1976-1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality-a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field. Yet, as these contributions meticulously reveal, those very truisms, when revisited with a fresh eye, can lead to new, unexpected insights into the history of sexuality, necessitating a return to and reinterpretation of Foucault's richly complex work. This volume will be necessary reading for students of historical sexuality as well as for those readers in German history and German studies generally who have an interest in the history of sexuality.

Scott Spector is Professor in the Department of History and Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Helmut Puff is Professor in the Departments of History and Germanic Languages at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Sissy home boys or domestic outlaws? Through a series of vivid case studies taken from across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matt Cook explores the emergence of these trenchant stereotypes and looks at how they play out in the home and family lives of queer men.

A critical survey of Hollywood film musicals from the 1960s to the present. This book examines how, in the post-studio system era, cultural, industrial and stylistic circumstances transformed this once happy-go-lucky genre into one both fluid and cynical enough to embrace the likes of "Rocky Horror" and pave the way for "Cannibal!" and "Moulin Rouge!."

The Soviet attempt to propagandise the "new Soviet woman" through the magazines "Rabotnitsa" and "Krest'yanka" from the 1920s to the end of the Stalin era is explored here. Women were expected to play a full role in the construction of socialism, but they also had to reproduce the population. Balancing work and family did not prove easy in a climate of shifting economic and demographic priorities, and the periodic changes made to the model are charted here.

Here is a pioneering and revealing study of the meaning of the abortion experience for American men. The book draws on over 400 detailed surveys from men involved in an abortion, along with opinion data from secondary polls of American women.